This invention relates to interne applications. In particular, the invention relates to an application runtime environment and framework for codeless development and cloud hosted components and configurations.
Background art technologies and methods for creating web sites and software applications, rich internet applications (RIA) or not, are too complex at the language and implementation levels. Data-configurable solutions for RIA content use multiple software platforms and components to achieve data persistence, retrieval manipulation and view (e.g., open source Content Repository for Java®Technology API (JCR)). Complex systems involve multiple installed components that must integrate with multiple hardware and software systems in their configuration (e.g., LINUX® operating system, APACHE™ web server, mysql, php, browser and potentially JAVASCRIPT® programming language, and/or FLASH® player). Furthermore, layout using hypertext markup language (HTML and CSS, including HTML5) is cumbersome, and alternatives can be difficult to develop because of their complexity and can easily result in sites that are more complex to maintain and slower to load on the web. Background art data-driven RIA content management systems (CMS, also referred to as web content management (WCM) and enterprises content management (ECM)) do not allow for enough possibilities in RIA design and are limited in terms of performance (e.g., dot corn domain wix, ADOBE® CQ5).
Implementations of simple database driven software applications (web, desktop, mobile) today are much more complex than they need to be. A few types of data records, including primary and foreign keys, and perhaps reference data, along with content such as images and static text are all the data that are generally required. User interfaces for web applications are fairly easy to build, but interfacing with such a simply structured database over the Internet is complex.
Systems supporting the addition and editing of such data over the Internet require even more complexity. Scalability is accomplished primarily through the publishing of content derived from complex systems to cloud networks with multiple nodes distributed from a single node, such as AMAZON® S3 and CLOUDFRONT® services. With the right choice of software, such as CQ5 Web Content Management (acquired by Adobe in October 2010), workable and scalable systems can be accomplished, but the systems themselves are much more complex than they need to be. Companies that can solve this problem charge a premium for their products costing much to the end-user including additional costs in time and resources associated with running the multiple components.
This problem exists as the result of the cumbersome standards-based technology on which such systems are built and is furthered by the additional complexity associated with the newer demands presented to web and software application developers today such as the need to support multiple devices (including multiple screen sizes and resolutions) and operating systems. This technological barrier can be bypassed through the re-invention of the base systems that applications run on. What is needed is a solution to this problem that expands upon a useful object oriented coding concept in use today.
The FLASH® ACTIONSCRIPT® 3 (AS3) language created by Adobe (Macromedia), and supported in APPLE® XCode today, contains a unique implementation for adding and removing application components from application display (and corresponding system processing). Software applications created with this technology consist of objects extended from display object and display object container classes (interactive or display only), that support the concept of a display object tree within a software application. Within this structure, there is always a single root object within the tree that can contain any number of children, whose children can contain further children and so on resulting in a tree of objects for display and user-interaction in the form of an application. This technology helps to provide an environment in which objects can be built as combinations of other objects and where chunks of objects can be grouped together or added and removed from display using this simple construct.
The background art is characterized by U.S. Pat. No. 7,155,676 and U.S. Patent Application Nos. 2002/0100027 and 2007/0011650; the disclosures of which patent and patent application are incorporated by reference as if fully set forth herein.